this also, yeah, there’s plenty of people china could drop bombs on, or, opposition groups they could fund in proxy wars or civil wars, probably to their strategic advantage, and they mostly don’t do it. they’ve taken a much softer strain in terms of geopolitics, I think.

I don’t think China would drop bombs as soon as possible. I think they’ll start dropping bombs as soon as that is the best or easiest way of achieving some goal.

See, now that’s totally different, as a claim, slightly more reasonable, glad you clarified.

I also, I dunno, I think I just dispute that the disposition of the US empire would immediately lead to some sort of mass arms race, or struggle. I think at most you’d expect to see some more minor movement on china’s other political objectives, like just, taking control of taiwan, which I imagine would be a pretty much instantaneous and relatively bloodless kind of move, since they’re most of the way there already. But militaries, and military spending, isn’t infinite, it’s a direct drain on the economy in real terms, especially with modern warfare, as we’ve seen with ukraine, and especially with the threat of nukes.

We’re able to produce all that military shit because we just dump a frankly massive and insane portion of our economy (and especially our extractive economy) into it, in a kind of constant feedback loop where people in power pay themselves. People who work at lockheed martin get hired from positions as US military personnel, where the FAANG is a revolving door with the CIA, that sort of shit. All as sort of a massive sunk cost, that would be pretty hard to disentangle from while maintaining the US economy, since the US economy is so tied to the US empire. We can look at the sort of, landscape that emerged out of the slow dissolution of the new deal, and post new deal government projects, as being less a sort of desert where everything just fell into ruins, and more being a morph kind of slow and incestuous merge between government organizations and private companies, since the “necessity” of those organizations still existed.

I think there’s also definitely some extent to which we’re getting cooked by china more than we realize with this kind of stuff because our economic metrics are so fucked as to be almost certainly useless.

If you can get your objective without draining massive portions of your economy, then there’s really no reason to, and I don’t think china would have many problems taking really any soft power objective they set their eyes on. Obviously I’m not a soothsayer, so I can’t say what the landscape would form into given this hypothetical, but I don’t see a whole lot of geopolitical conflicts of interest, or uncrossable roads, so far as china is concerned in terms of their longer term economic growth or outlook.

I think there’s also something to note there about how like, I dunno. I think it’s naive to think that military conflicts purely arise out of a latent cultural xenophobia. I think it would be naive to say that plays no role, either, but I don’t think it’s as nearly shaping a factor as people make it out to be. Certainly, if your nation’s finding itself in such a position where someone so idealistic and delusional is making your higher level decisions, and especially your military decisions, as the US currently finds themselves in, you’d probably be cooked like, whatever that person’s position is. Probably there’s some sort of back and forth here also about china’s interactions with their uyghur population, perhaps, as an example of how they’ve responded to that kinda stuff, and I don’t think they have a bad track record.

Why are you proposing that human nature is fundamentally different now?

Because I don’t think it’s human nature that people just inevitably drop bombs on on another as soon as they’re given the opportunity to do so, and I think that’s an extremely oversimplified view of both human nature and history, to think that’s the case. I think, broadly, it depends on a lot of factors. Economic factors, normal economic realities, and the ability of the economic systems to self-regulate and feed information from the bottom to the top, and vice versa, as a result of their political structures. Cultural factors, like the base level of xenophobia present in a culture for other cultures, you know, to what degree that xenophobia shapes the economic realities or is shaped by the economic reality.

I think saying, oh, well, if china was the world hegemon tomorrow, they’d drop bombs as soon as they could, I don’t even really think that passes the smell test. They’d still have to deal with the EU, with Russia, with the militaries of basically every force they’d want to contend with, and with their lack of as nearly of a well-funded military industrial complex. They’ve shown a much higher tendency to approach geopolitical situations with their huge amounts of economic leverage as a result of their manufacturing base rather than just using a big stick to get everything they want.

I don’t see any reason why that would majorly change if the US were gone. If they were to pivot to military industrial capacity, there’s a certain cost-opportunity there in terms of what it would take out of their economic capacity, and it wouldn’t really be the same cost-opportunity that we have (or, mostly, used to have histrorically) in the US, since their public and private sectors are more fused than ours, so they’re not benefiting from the natural efficiency of a large government organization in terms of overall savings, when that’s basically what every corporation over there is, or, is more than over here. Why would they risk their position bombing the shit out of other nations when they could basically just not?

The belt and road initiative has already showcased their geopolitical approach. It’s still something they use a military to protect in terms of infrastructural investments, but those infrastructural investments seem to me to be more significant than those of most western occupying forces, and seem to take a different fundamental stance in terms of technology. China’s economy doesn’t revolve, to the same extent as the US, around the extraction, control, and importation of cheap, sour, heavy, crude oil, from other nations, which can then be refined into much more valuable petroleum products in terms of shipping while the US positions itself as a middle-man between this extractive base and the rest of the world’s energy market. China’s built like 50 nuclear plants since like 2014-ish, we’ve built 2 new plants since the year 2000. That’s obviously shaped by necessity, but that’s also just a vastly different approach.

Rounding up immigrants (lets not pretend they’ll be checking documents) will destroy agricultural corps and one of the US’ largest exports

Not if they take advantage of private prison structures in which prisoners are already paid like 0.15 cents to do agricultural labor in places like georgia.

The rest of this shit is maybe hype depending on the level at which it actually ends up hurting corporations. Elon’s part of the circle because he wants the tariffs because he can’t compete with BYD in any market they’ve been competing in, and he wants to foreclose things like the EV tax credits so nobody else can come up and usurp his position at the top of the market. I’m sure there are plenty of other tariffs that american corporations would be in favor of. The domestic US auto industry basically only exists in the form it does, influencing infrastructure and tons of other shit, because of the chicken tax, which was some random protectionist legislation in the 60’s.

Tax cuts will increase inflation for the bottom class, and cost of living, and probably every other metric, but nobody gives a fuck about that.

And I’m not sure to what degree the real estate market will be affected by domestic US military interventionism seeing as how we’ve already had a couple high profile marches and protests over the last 20 years that have had pretty outsized police and national guard responses, and the real estate market has done nothing but go up basically. Both up in value, and upwards into the hands of mass property management corporations and landlords.

I know everyone’s trying to stay optimistic about the sort of, incompetence of the trump regime, and the degree to which this is all just hype and drivel meant to drive the turnout of his base. I’m sure plenty of it is hype, but I’m also sure plenty of it isn’t. He still ended up appointing those supreme court justices, which has already fucked over an incredibly large proportion of stuff, and will probably fuck over everything for the next couple decades, since nobody’s gonna have enough of a spine to even threaten packing the court.

China is just like any other country comprised of humans that has existed ever, and would do the same things the US is doing now if they could.

Yeah, except they’re different countries, made up of different people, with a different culture, with a pretty much fundamentally different kind of organizational structure governing them. I don’t think “well, they’d probably do it too, if the US were gone” is a super convincing argument in favor of the US dropping bombs on people.

yerp, I partially think that was necessary for this route (which probably would’ve happened agnostic to either party), since central california does a shit ton of agriculture.

do you not think, that potentially, they just go the indentured servitude route, after holding people for the “crime” of illegal immigration?

if it ends up being like the steam deck layout, they’ll probably just fuse the touch screens into one larger one in the center of the controller, towards the bottom. At that point, it would probably just be pretty similar to the playstation controller, but with slightly more questionable ergonomics, or maybe a more usable touchscreen.

I don’t think you can save something you didn’t have to begin with tbh

Not voting is just plain lazy, that’s all.

You know I’d actually like to push back on this. The people who elected trump were white, uneducated, low information voters. I don’t think people who aren’t interested in politics, in the political system, who don’t care to look into the ideas that shape the economy, shape the policy, beyond a couple weeks every four years, I don’t think those people should be voting. I think it should be their choice, but I think their choice should probably be to not vote, because in that case, their votes are going to do damage. You could see thinkpieces floating all around before the election of people talking about how higher levels of voter turnout across the board, contrary to classical thought, would help republicans this time around, rather than democrats, mostly hinging on those same kinds of low-information voters, part of the younger generation which have aged into it. Your classic 22 year old joe rogan bro voters that like free weed, but don’t understand abortion rights because they’re not women, and think trump will give them some sort of economic opportunity.

Me personally, I would rather those probably just admit that they have no idea what the hell is going on, and choose not to vote.

I believe that would be equally accurate, yes. The republicans have been pretty responsive to their base’s social desires, mostly with like, white, uneducated, evangelical christian psychos, but they haven’t really passed any policy which tangibly makes their life better, and there’s only so much you can do to address the fundamental cognitive dissonance. If cost of living goes up and not down, which it in all likelihood will if trump rocks the boat too much, then they’re gonna have to resort to the same playbook that democrats do in order to play off that failure.

The only real difference there is that the republican voter base is more primed to believe those excuses just sort of as a matter of their media ecosystem and position in the political sphere. But you’ll see them still resort to hand-wringing over how those pesky elitist democrats just blocked their real policy, and then when they lose, about how next time, they’ll really do something to help out the people, they just weren’t able to get it all off the ground because we only had four years and the economy’s gonna get worse before it gets better and the democratic admin is just gonna be coasting on our improvements and so on and so on. If you talk to republicans, especially the older, not explicitly fascist ones, the post-reagan ones, you’ll notice this pretty similar sort of rhetoric.

Those low information, low turnout, suburbanite, implicitly biased “I’m not racist but” or “racism doesn’t mean anything anymore” republicans make up a pretty big chunk of their coalition. I would say even they probably make up a majority, and the terminally online turbochud fascist extremists are the minority that’s growing at a somewhat alarming rate.

I mean, it’s what obama did, and he had a pretty successful series of campaigns. I dunno, gay marriage, legal weed, and the ACA were all of what he did, pretty much, outside of drone striking a shit ton of people and deporting a fuck ton of people, so I think you can pretty much just lie and give out the most sparing, minor of all handouts, and then pretty much people will jump on board.

Of course, this raises the related question that if people are considering getting themselves thrown in prison for the food and housing, that says a lot about the state of social services in that country and maybe something else needs fixing more badly.

Generally that’s where I would peg that as a train of thought, yeah. I don’t think you need an incentive to keep people from going to prison. People don’t want to go to prison, generally, it’s not a good thing even in, say, Finland, or whatever other example people want to use. People sticking up a bank for one dollar to get healthcare isn’t a state of affairs that you have if you already have free healthcare. Trying to get arrested to avoid homelessness isn’t a problem if you can already avoid homelessness through normal social institutions. In fact, I’d say that avoiding homelessness through conventional means is greatly idealm considering a shit ton of homeless people interface with the law, and are arrested and processed regularly, and lots of inmates are homeless immediately upon getting out. It’s a whole system, not just in one part, which is what makes it so hard to get rid of or reform away, and perhaps even impossible.

The State should not force the prisoners to work, but it also shouldn’t be the State’s responsibility to provide janitors or cooks to look after them.

You should understand that this represents a logistical problem for the prison. Now they have to ensure that prisoners are certified and trained to handle food, no small feat, and you also have to be conscious of the idea that prisoners could pretty easily stop doing dishes, making food, eating food, as a form of hunger strike, in order to protest the very fact that they’re being made to make food, on top of the fact that they’re being extricated from society, deprived of the right to be a productive member of society, deprived of the ability to socialize with other people that aren’t criminals, deprived of free access to information, really, any freedom whatsoever.

That’s along with the argument the other commenter brought up, about prisoners just organizing themselves into a de-facto government where the most shat on prisoners will have to do everything. If you decide to come up with a constant rotation, a chore wheel, then at a certain level this just devolves into massive levels of prison corruption, where a couple bribes to a couple prisoner guards can change around some labor forms and then suddenly, again, the most shat upon prisoners are doing all the labor.

You don’t eliminate these inefficiencies at any point, either, these inefficiencies rear their heads more the more people you arrest and put into the prison, the more things you criminalize, the higher the recidivism rates. None of these issues resolve magically, they get worse.

This is effectively just the same as advocating for the status quo as it currently exists, with the only minor difference between, say, making license plates or fighting fires, being that instead, they’re just doing domestic labor which is much closer to them in proximity, and easier for you to think of as their personal responsibility to handle. That doesn’t matter so much, what matters in reality here are the numbers.

The idea is that you’re trying to recoup the costs immediately through something like a labor camp, which is what this still is. That’s sort of an option of last resort, or an option that is used, in most circumstances, as it is right now, for members of political opposition or other kinds of outright status-quo threats. You instead should make the calculation in the broad strokes, years down the line. Can these murderers, thieves, and perhaps even, gasp, loiterers, be taught to be functioning members of society? Can they give back more than they have taken from the taxpayer over the course of their life? More than just for the individuals, but can these prisoners do this on the whole?

That’s the way you should be thinking about this, not “Can we save 15 bucks here and there by not paying someone to clean up or cook for the prisoners?”. By framing it like that, you’ve bought into the argument that supports the status quo organization, here.

it’s not an excuse, we’re just telling you the reality. how do you think hitler got elected?

well, hey, they’re all american voters, right, and apparently we’re all too moronic to understand the basic things at stake, so maybe that is what we deserve, right?

She also had Taylor Swift, Bernie Sanders, Obama, Mark Cuban, multple military generals endorsing her, among others.

ah yes, taylor swift, noted political figure. surely, that will drive turnout. obama and bernie sanders, yes, great choices, truly, this will save us even when we’re not campaigning on their policies. mark cuban. yes. multiple military generals, very cool.

extrapolate what you actually mean with this train of thought. what do you think the democrats should’ve actually done differently? they’re the ones who’ve lost, what should they have done more? who should they have appealed to? seems like everyone wants to put the emphasis solely on the trump voters and the non-voters, and since the non-voters are non-voters, oh, wowie, look at that, all we have left are trump voters to go after.

shocker. I wonder what the party will head after, with this train of thought? I wonder which direction they’ll go in? surely, they wouldn’t double down, right? surely, they wouldn’t go further after the trump voters, after all the committed registered republican voters that turned out last time switched and… lost them a percentage point in that category, this go around. from 6% to 5%. we should emphasize the trump voters more, we should go after them more, obviously, because they’re the only ones willing to vote!

extract what you’re talking about, extrapolate. if you just run around up in your feels as a non-american, blaming the wind for blowing, then you’re just gonna end up blasting darpanet even harder.

So, we can wring our hands about how awful our fellow man is for not seeing the clear moral imperative that we do (exactly like the Genocide-Joe folks have been doing for months), or we can recognize that Dems need to start doing things differently.

no no, don’t you understand? the american voter is just too racist, because they voted for donald trump, so we just need to tack harder to the right, I mean the center, actually I do just mean the right. then, surely, they will vote for the democratic party in overwhelming, obama-era numbers.

I’m going to suggest this book as some personal reading on this issue. But the point I would more broadly make is that running exclusively oppositional candidates does not work, and I would say that’s probably because they don’t really present a clear vision of the future, they only present opposition to something rhetorically. By opposing something in that way, you sort of, only serve to reinforce that thing. Only define yourself in relation to it.

That’s also not really to speak about how she legitimately presented an incredibly conservative face to her campaign, and if that’s the case, people would just vote for the guy who’s actually just conservative.

all the left things that left people care about aren’t just progressive policy, they’re populist policy. Abortion makes the most sense when classified as a healthcare issue. Universal healthcare, and medicare for all, consistently polls popular. So does increasing the minimum wage. So does student loan forgiveness, and free college, which is why biden campaigned on that.

Harris’ most popular policy was probably price controls, because despite all the hemming and hawwing that economists get up to whenever you touch any economic lever, that’s something that the american people can believe will decrease their costs of living. people don’t give a shit about the left, or about ideologies, you’re right on that front, as the person before you is. but make no mistake, those policies which tangibly reign in the economy, control it, and give people free shit, those are, at the very least, progressive policies, if not outright leftist policies.